Blach Construction Company

“You can’t force anyone to use a certain software,” Senior BIM Engineer Henry Qi from Blach Construction says. “You need to show them how productive you are yourself in order to make them want to try it.”

How a BIM Engineer showed the benefits of Tekla BIMsight to the project team

Subcontractors learning the value of Tekla BIMsight

Blach Construction Company and their Design Build partners designed and built the San Jose Student Health Center at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. It’s a three-story ConXtech steel structure building, all in all 52 000 square feet.

Blach uses Tekla BIMsight because it’s a productive spatial coordination tool, syncs between users through the cloud, and is available to all project team members free of cost. Their MEP subcontractors were Autodesk Navisworks users, so they didn’t want to change coordination tools. But during the project it became apparent, that using Tekla BIMsight would save them significant time.

Updating the design instantaneously

During the design phase Blach held weekly all-day design coordination meetings, where all subcontractors were present, with their computers, and ready to edit their models. The team reviewed all the models brought together in Tekla BIMsight, and went through design details to avoid clashes and maximize ease of maintenance. With everyone using Tekla BIMsight, updating the models for everyone could be done right there in the room, automatically, as opposed to uploading updated models to a server, then distributing the location to all parties, everyone downloading the model, and then opening it in their software. Also because they used IFC, there was no need to convert files into different formats.

One clear advantage to using Tekla BIMsight is, being a free solution, project team members that weren’t part of the Design Build Team and weren’t BIM capable had access to the project federated model in real time as the Design Build Team worked through coordination, the Blach team explains. It’s always a challenge to manage the uncoordinated scopes of work and using Tekla BIMsight to involve those team members goes a long way to solving that problem.

“Using Tekla BIMsight sharing with Dropbox and IFC models was really simple and fast. This was the most useful function of Tekla BIMsight,” says Senior BIM Engineer Henry Qi. “Model update was almost instantaneous. I could talk with one of our subcontractors on the phone to get something changed and then the entire team would get to see the change as the model gets uploaded to Dropbox. 2D Drawing changes would take much longer because it would have to be distributed to everyone and each team member would have to update their reference in their modeling environment.”

85% fewer RFIs

After the spatial coordination was done, the project team continued to use Tekla BIMsight to see each other’s models and coordinate the installation of the work. “That is not very easy with Autodesk products,” Qi comments.

Using Tekla BIMsight on-site really paid off: the project had 30 MEP RFIs from the site versus the 200 MEP RFIs they usually have in a project this size.

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Trimble is an international company focusing on positioning-related technology for different industries. Tekla software solutions for advanced building information modeling and structural engineering are part of Trimble offering.